Have you ever missed a really important meeting and wished you could travel back in time to attend it? Even an audio recording of the meeting is often less than helpful. Without the benefit of facial expressions and body language, you can't always tell who is speaking or get the full import of words. Someday soon, though, companies might be able to record meetingswith all the visuals and sound includedand create a searchable database.

That's the idea behind the Microsoft RingCam. The device is an omnidirectional video camera that can record a 360-degree view of a room. The RingCam's software lets you identify speakers as well as review and search the contents of the meeting. You can retrieve content and listen, filtering out unwanted speakers, using a timeline as a navigation tool to jump into interesting segments, and clicking on a whiteboard keyframe to jump to a specific point.

At Microsoft Research, the RingCam sits in the middle of a conference room table and records meetings. Developers Henrique Malvar, senior researcher and manager of communication and signal processing, and researcher Yong Rui built the RingCam out of components that are available to everyone today. Its array of eight microphones in the base connect to a group of five small cameras about 6 inches off the ground; both the cameras and microphones face outward in a ring. The microphones are placed low to avoid sound reflection, and the cameras are positioned higher to get a better picture.

The cameras are simple Webcams, connected via FireWire. (Malvar says a USB 2.0 version would also be practical.) A separate, off-the-shelf digital camera, not connected to the RingCam itself, records a whiteboard at the meeting. The team chose this setup instead of an electronic whiteboard-capture technology to avoid special pens and erasers or changes in behavior.

What really makes the RingCam work is the software, called Microsoft Distributed Meetings. It's a client/server application: The server does most of the processing, and the client lets you review the meeting and find the parts you think are interesting. "The trick is in the software's analysis of the data," says Malvar. It correlates the audio, video, and whiteboard inputs.

The server software takes the images and stitches them together in a panoramic 360-degree view. A technology called beam focusing uses the microphone array to localize where the source of the sound is coming from. When combined with computer-based tracking, beam focusing lets the software connect the voice to the person speaking. The software may eventually be able to identify speakers with the help of an address book or with the use of facial-recognition technology.

In the client's view of the meeting, you see the person who's speaking in a large window, while the entire meeting appears in a smaller, panoramic view. You can select a specific speaker out of a timeline to watch only that person's remarks. You can also speed up the conversation to save time. Rui says that most people can be understood clearly at 1.4 times the speed of normal speech, with the pitch adjusted for proper sound.

The primary goal of the RingCam is to let people review a meeting after it happens, so the system is designed for post processing on the server. A secondary use is real-time broadcasting.

Microsoft is not yet working on turning this into a product, but Malvar expects it to be available in three to four years. The RingCam uses mostly off-the-shelf components and could probably be built for $500. But the software, which runs on a dual 2-GHZ server, is still in the prototype stage now.

The RingCam currently captures video at 15 frames per second, and the whiteboard at 1 frame every 5 seconds. The latter speed may be increased in later versions to produce a more continuous flow. The researchers imagine including such features as automatic speech recognition, the conversion of whiteboard drawings to something like Visio, and handwriting recognition.

The researchers plan more user studies to determine how people react to the system, but they already know that a privacy option is needed. The camera includes a privacy button to turn it off and might even have an "oops" button to erase the previous 30 seconds.

Michael J. Miller's Forward Thinking Blog: forwardthinking.pcmag.com
Michael J. Miller is chief information officer at Ziff Brothers Investments, a private investment firm. From 1991 to 2005, Miller was editor-in-chief of PC Magazine, responsible for the editorial direction, quality and presentation of the world's largest computer publication.
Until late 2006, Miller was the Chief Content Officer for Ziff Davis Media, responsible for overseeing the editorial positions of Ziff Davis's magazines, websites, and events. As Editorial Director for Ziff Davis Publishing since 1997, Miller took an active role in...
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